Keith Jarrett was born May 8, 1945, in Allentown, Pennsylvania, a child prodigy who began studying piano at three and gave his first solo recital at seven. His career accelerated in the 1960s after joining prominent jazz groups, including Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and Charles Lloyd's quartet, whose own story is told in full in Art Blakey's JazzProfiles.com profile, work that sharpened his improvisational vocabulary considerably.

His best-known recording, 1975's The Köln Concert, a meditative, entirely improvised solo piano performance, became the best-selling solo piano recording in jazz history. In 1983 he formed a widely acclaimed trio with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Jack DeJohnette, at a moment when it was considered unfashionable for top players to focus on jazz standards rather than original material; Jarrett insisted the point was never the material itself, but what the player brought to it.

In 2020, Jarrett revealed he had suffered two debilitating strokes in 2018, leaving him partially paralyzed and largely unable to play piano.

Jarrett's fully improvised solo concerts, developed without any prior compositional plan, established an entirely new performance format within jazz piano, and his Standards Trio's decades-long commitment to the American songbook repertoire proved that interpretive depth could be as radical a statement as original composition.